1.     Private vs. Socialized Healthcare

Two women are diagnosed in the same week at the same hospital with the same, aggressive cancer. 

One woman happens to be very wealthy with a great, executive position in a top corporation.  Her health care covers every form of treatment available, for as long as she needs it.  Thanks to a comprehensive combination of radiation, chemo, and immuno-therapy treatments, she goes into remediation and lives a normal life for many years. 

The second woman is a hard-working person in blue-collar work, making just enough to be in the gap between Medicaid and good insurance.  She has coverage, but it’s spotty and constantly subject to delays and denials which she has to fight over at every juncture.  It covers old-fashioned chemo, but not extensive, targeted radiation therapy or immuno-therapy.  Between the restrictions on kinds of therapy and the stress of dealing with the limitations logistically, she worsens and dies within six months.

Should their incomes have made the difference between living and dying?

We must acknowledge that wealth has always has been positively correlated with mortality age.  Some of the factors that create this correlation are beyond our control, but an increasing number are not.  The example from this case is entirely within our control.  We are immoral to the extent that we allow wealth to determine life or death when we could easily do otherwise. There is no counterargument I have ever heard that is greater than the moral imperative to act when we can to prevent premature death.

2.     Free-market Capitalism vs. Socialist Policy

Suddenly, all regulation and oversight on business practices are abandoned.  The market is finally, entirely free.

A major food corporation realizes that excess population provides a tremendous resource for protein.  Murder is still illegal, but the laws can be avoided if the killing takes place in non-national jurisdiction areas.  So the companies set up island processing plants and start operations to kidnap people from places where conditions make it the most possible and profitable.  The people are rendered into delicious sausages and various supplements which obtain a tremendous market worldwide without anyone every realizing that they’re eating human beings.  The company has no legal obligation to disclose, be inspected, or otherwise regulated.

Are you against this?

If you say, “No,” then you are utterly immoral and you need to get help.

If you say, “Yes,” then do you believe the company should be regulated so it cannot do this?

If you said, “No,” then you’re really not against the practice, because it will surely continue so long as there is profit to be had.  If you are simply arguing that no company would do this, then you are living in a fantasy-world, given what organized crime and even legal corporations already do.  If there is money to be made and no punishment on the horizon for making it that way, there are immoral people who will do it.

If you said, “Yes” to regulating against this practice, then you believe in regulation of the free market.

This case is premised in an absurd extreme.  However, it illustrates that most people are moral enough to believe that free markets require regulation and oversight.  We are not a bunch of Ayn Rands when you get down to it.

The next question is simply what levels and extents of regulation and oversight protect the world to the extent that our morality demands?  What extents and types are not a threat to our moral responsibility?  Which ones of those are protecting us less than they are harming our overall benefits in the long run? 

Those are the questions with which a reasonable society grapples rather than throwing around false allegations that any socialist approach or regulation is tantamount to autocratic communism.  We already agree that it’s not, we just differ on where the appropriate place of the regulation and policy are.  We are allowed to disagree on that.  We should be disagreeing on that and always working out what serves people best in our ever-changing world.

Democratic systems allow us to have the debates publicly, decide policies, and change them based upon experience.  A healthy democracy promotes this process by cutting off excessive power by any one faction or interest.  It has legal guarantees to prevent abuse of minorities and otherwise promotes majority rule.  The combination fosters pluralistic decision-making to lead to utilitarian outcomes.

We need to recognize that it is not the mistakes we make when we experiment with policies which lead us to the truly terrible messes and oppressions, but corruption of the democratic process.  Corruption is when single factions or interests become powerful enough to get around or destroy elements of the democratic system so they get to make policy determinations.  They undermine the peoples’ efforts to work towards utilitarian outcomes.  They use marketing to blind people to the corruption and to polarize views so as to paralyze policy debate.  They normalize the situation in which most of us are effectively cut out of decision-making. 

Corruption can be plutocratic, communistic, or fascistic.  In the Soviet Union, the corruption was from statist, authoritarian, one-party Communists, who were less committed to socialism than to insuring their own power.  In our society today, the corruption comes from rich capitalists, who are less committed to the health of capitalism than to insuring their own wealth and power.  Either way, utilitarian policies are prevented.  The few steal from the many and get us to feel it is normal, inevitable, perhaps even desirable.  Let’s have solidarity.  Let’s get together and stop them.